Aletho News

US Election Triggers Fears of ‘Slow Motion Coup D’Etat’ & ‘Daylight Robbery of Votes’, Observers Say

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 06.11.2020

Repeated delays in vote counting and reported irregularities have cast a cloud over the integrity of the US election process, say American observers, discussing the alleged voter fraud and President Donald Trump’s chances of settling the matter in the Supreme Court.

The winner is still undecided in the US presidential elections, as some states have yet to announce their final results. This situation has triggered confusion, especially given that both candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, have already declared that they are on the path to victory.

It’s Electors Who Officially Determine the Winner

“Contrary to what many might assume, the American people do not directly choose the president and the determination of the winner of a presidential election is not when the media declares a winner or when the apparent loser concedes,” says American independent journalist and political analyst Max Parry. “In fact, Election Day itself is the voting for electors from each state, the governors of which draw up a list to the electoral college once all of the in-person, provisional and absentee ballots are counted.”

The electors then officially meet the following month in their respective state capitals to vote for the president, and then in January the election is certified by Congress, the journalist underscores.

It can’t be ruled out that that if Biden is declared the winner by his campaign and the media in the coming days “the state legislatures in undecided states could explore the legal ambiguity of the electoral college process and attempt to appoint pro-Trump electors anyway”, according to Parry.

“All of the contested states have legislatures in which both houses have GOP majorities, so theoretically they may try to overturn the vote they believe to be fraudulent and elect pro-Trump representatives to the Electoral College,” he suggests.

Nevertheless, the journalist doubts that “enough Republican lawmakers will be willing to override the popular vote, unless it is proven to be fraudulent”, because the situation may potentially spark a political chaos and a constitutional crisis.

‘A Slow Motion Coup D’Etat’

“I’ve been saying for weeks that if Trump was going to win, he would have to win big or else the result would be stolen from him”, notes Jim Jatras, retired US Diplomat and former GOP Senate foreign policy adviser.This follows the pattern of what Americans saw in 2018 in several California districts that were called for the Republicans on election night, according to the former diplomat: “Over the days and weeks that followed [the results] were shifted over to the Democrats as they ‘found’ new votes and mail-in ballots.”

Politico shed light on the issue, citing then House Speaker Paul Ryan who complained that the state’s voting system is “bizarre”: “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race”. However, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla rejected Ryan’s concerns.

The counting of votes in the 2020 election does seem suspicious, according to Max Parry. Although it makes sense that the majority of absentee ballots would be overwhelmingly blue since Trump urged his followers to vote in person, “this does not account for the widespread irregularities or the excessive duration of time it has taken where several days after Election Day, several states have still yet to be called.”

The journalist believes that “a disputed result is being manufactured in order to trigger a crisis where Trump can be removed from office,” calling the unfolding situation “a slow motion coup d’etat” which was “engineered” in advance.

“Let’s be honest”, says Jatras. “Heavily corrupt cities, too, simply find as many ballots as they would need to flip over some of the marginal states like Wisconsin and Michigan, which looked like they have already occurred, and possibly now Pennsylvania. So I think we are seeing really what amounts to the daylight robbery of an election that Donald Trump, in fact, really won, but will be shifted over to Biden. And unless some really, really sharp lawyers can find some way to counter this, I think it’s likely to be successful.”

Alleged Mail-in Fraud & Non-Citizens’ Voting

Trump was not incorrect when he claimed that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud, according to Max Parry.

“In fact, according to some academic studies more than 20% of all mail-in ballots are discounted for one reason or another,” he says. “In the 2016 election, thousands of mail-in ballots were discounted because of postage due, while over 3 million were rejected in total.”

While the Democratic Party and the mainstream media deny the assumption that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud, a US conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, issued a legal memo in July 2020 warning that “absentee or mail-in voting leaves America’s electoral system vulnerable to fraud, forgery, coercion, and voter intimidation”. On the other hand, the think tank pointed out that “uncovering instances of voter fraud is difficult” allowing those committing fraud to “get away without repercussions”.

In addition to this, conservative watchdog Judicial Watch earlier raised the red flag over the potential illegal voting by non-citizens in the 2016 election. According to JW, a total of 43 million non-citizens are currently living within US borders; of these, approximately 12 million are illegal aliens.

JW is not the first who has drawn attention to the issue. In 2014 an opinion piece by Jesse Richman and David Earnest, fellows of Old Dominion University, was published in The Washington Post’s blog “Monkey Cage” suggesting that 6.4% of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2% of non-citizens voted in 2010. Their study, which has been heavily criticised since then, alleged that non-citizen migrants’ participation could affect “the outcome of close races”.

“As for illegal voting by non-citizens, there is a lack of convincing evidence to support the idea that it is widespread and the sources I trust say it is rare,” Parry says.

However, despite mounting criticism, Jesse Richman told Wired in January 2017 that he still stood by his findings, warning, however, against exaggerating the matter. One of Richman’s detractors, Rick Hasen, author of the Election Law Blog, also admitted that “noncitizen voting is a real, if relatively small, problem”, according to the magazine.

US Supreme Court May Settle the Dispute

Touching upon the unfolding legal battles unleashed by the Trump campaign in a number of battleground states, Max Parry notes that, obviously, the Bush v. Gore (2000) case gives Donald Trump the precedent to go to court to dispute the count.

It is quite plausible that the Trump campaign could move to settle the election in the US Supreme Court, but the key will be “providing sufficient burden of proof in wrongdoing”, according to him.

“A recount may be the Trump campaign’s best option, given the reports of irregularities in several states, some of which have automatic recounts if the margin between candidates is estimated thin enough in the final result or permit requests by candidates to do so if the result is within a margin small enough,” the journalist notes. “They will have to wait until the result is finalised and force a recount before state deadlines.”

Parry recollects that in 2000, the recount did expose several irregularities in Florida. However, in the Bush v Gore case it was the Supreme Court which intervened and rejected the recount”, the journalist notes, adding that it would be only the second time in US history for the court to decide the winner.

Meanwhile, the distrust prompted by delayed vote counting in American swing states is on the rise. On 5 November, Breitbart noted that three Democrat officials overseeing Pennsylvania elections – Gov. Tom Wolf (D), Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar (D), and Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) – earlier “expressed disdain” for President Trump on Twitter. The conservative media outlet suggests that this could have weighed on the election process in the state.

​At the same time, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled in favour of the Trump campaign on Thursday, allowing election observers to watch the mail-in ballot count in Philadelphia.

November 6, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception | United States | 1 Comment

The U.S. Inability To Count Votes is a National Disgrace. And Dangerous.

By Glenn Greenwald | November 4, 2020

The richest and most powerful country on earth — whether due to ineptitude, choice or some combination of both — has no ability to perform the simple task of counting votes in a minimally efficient or confidence-inspiring manner. As a result, the credibility of the voting process is severely impaired, and any residual authority the U.S. claims to “spread” democracy to lucky recipients of its benevolence around the world is close to obliterated.

At 7:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the day after the 2020 presidential elections, the results of the presidential race, as well as control of the Senate, are very much in doubt and in chaos. Watched by rest of the world — deeply affected by who rules the still-imperialist superpower — the U.S. struggles and stumbles and staggers to engage in a simple task mastered by countless other less powerful and poorer countries: counting votes. Some states are not expected to finished their vote-counting until the end of this week or beyond.

The same data and polling geniuses who pronounced that Hillary Clinton had a 90% probability or more of winning the 2016 election, and who spent the last three months proclaiming the 2020 election even more of a sure thing for the Democratic presidential candidate, are currently insisting that Biden, despite being behind in numerous key states, is still the favorite by virtue of uncounted ballots in Democrat-heavy counties in the outcome-determinative states. [One went to sleep last night with the now-notorious New York Times needle of data guru Nate Cohn assuring the country that, with more than 80% of the vote counted in Georgia, Trump had more than an 80% chance to win that state, only to wake up a few hours later with the needle now predicting the opposite outcome; that all happened just a few hours after Cohn assured everyone how much “smarter” his little needle was this time around].

Given the record of failures and humiliations they have quickly compiled, what rational person would trust anything they say at this point? A citizen randomly chosen from the telephone book would be as reliable if not more so for sharing predictions. And the monumental failures of the polling industry and the data nerds who leech off it, for the second consecutive national election, only serve to sow even further doubt and confusion around the electoral process.

A completely untrustworthy voting count is now the norm. Two months after the New York state primary in late June, two Congressional races were in doubt by what The New York Times called “major delays in counting a deluge of 400,000 mail-in ballots and other problems.” In particular:

Thousands more ballots in the city were discarded by election officials for minor errors, or not even sent to voters until the day before the primary, making it all but impossible for the ballots to be returned in time.

It took a full six weeks for New York to finally declare a winner in those two primary races for Congress.

The coronavirus pandemic and the shutdowns and new votings rules it ushered in have obviously complicated the process, but the U.S. failure to simply count votes with any degree of efficiency, in a way that inspires even minimal confidence in the process, pre-dates the March, 2020 nationwide lockdowns. Even if one dismisses as aberrational the protracted, Court-decided, and still-untrusted outcome of the 2000 presidential election — only four national election cycles ago — the U.S. voting process is rife with major systemic failures and doubt-sowing inefficiencies that can be explained only as a deliberate choice and/or a perfect reflection of a collapsing, crumbling empire.

Recall the mass confusion that ensued back in January, in the very first Democratic Party primary election in the Iowa caucus, where a new app created and monetized by a bunch of sleazy Democratic operatives caused massive delays, confusion and an untrustworthy outcome. Later in the process, many Super Tuesday states — including California — were still counting votes weeks or even longer after the election was held (more than a week after the Democratic primary, California had still only counted roughly 75% of the ballots cast, depriving Bernie Sanders of a critical narrative victory on election night).

The 2018 midterm elections were also marred by pervasive irregularities. The Washington Post noted “thousands of reports of voting irregularities across the country… with voters complaining of broken machines, long lines and untrained poll workers improperly challenging Americans’ right to vote.”

And the full extent of the “irregularities” and treacherous outright cheating by the Democratic National Committee in the 2016 primary race between Clinton and Sanders was never fully appreciated given how pro-Clinton the press was. As just one example, “200,000 New York City voters” — many in pro-Sanders precincts — “had been illegally wiped off the rolls and prevented from voting in the presidential primary” (for one of the best-documented histories of just how pervasive were the shenanigans and cheating in the 2016 Democratic primary across multiple key states, listen to this TrueAnon episode).

However one wants to speculate about the motives for all of this, one thing is clear: it does not need to be this way. To eliminate all doubts about that fact, just look at Brazil.

After the pervasive voting problems in the 2018 midterms, I wrote an article with my Brazilian colleague Victor Pougy describing the extraordinary speed and efficiency with which Brazil — a country not exactly renowned for its speed and efficiency — counts its votes.

Brazil is not a small country. It is the fifth most-populous nation on the planet. Although its population is somewhat smaller than the U.S.’s (330 million to 210 million), its mandatory voting law, automatic registration, and 16-year-old voting age means the number of ballots to be counted is quite similar (105 million votes in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election compared to 130 million votes in the 2016 U.S. presidential election). And on the same date of its national elections, it, too, holds gubernatorial and Congressional elections in its twenty-seven states.

And yet Brazil — a much poorer and less technologically advanced country than the U.S., with a much shorter history of democracy — holds seamless, quick vote counts about which very few people harbor doubts. The elections are held on a Sunday, to ensure as many people as possible do not have work obligations to prevent voting, and polls close at 6:00 p.m.

For the 2018 presidential run-off election that led to Jair Bolsonaro’s victory, 90% of all votes were counted and the results released by 6:00 p.m. on the day of the election: the time the last state closed its polls. The full vote tally was available within a couple of hours after that. The same was true of the first-round voting held three weeks earlier — which also included races for governor, Senator and Congress in all the states: full vote totals were released by computer shortly after the polls closed and few had any doubts about their accuracy and legitimacy.

Hundreds of millions of Americans went to bed on Tuesday’s election night seeing Trump in the lead in key states, with the data experts of major outlets indicating that his victory in many of those states was highly likely. They woke up to the opposite indication: that Biden is now a slight favorite to win several if not all of those remaining key states. But what is clear is that it will be days if not longer before the votes are fully counted, with judicial proceedings almost certain to prolong the outcomes even further.

No matter what the final result, there will be substantial doubts about its legitimacy by one side or the other, perhaps both. And no deranged conspiracy thinking is required for that. An electoral system suffused with this much chaos, error, protracted outcomes and seemingly inexplicable reversals will sow doubt and distrust even among the most rational citizens.

The next time Americans hear from their government that they need to impose democracy in other countries — through wars, invasion, bombing campaigns or other forms of clandestine CIA “interference” — they should insist that democracy first be imposed in the United States. An already frazzled, intensely polarized and increasingly hostile populace now has to confront yet another election in the richest and most technologically advanced country on earth where the votes cannot be counted in a way that inspires even minimal degrees of confidence.

My analysis of the election itself, and the ongoing, systemic failures of the Democratic Party — no matter the outcome — will be posted later today. [$$]

November 6, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception | United States | 12 Comments